Please help with disk partitioning

[Lori]

I have a new 120 GB hard drive which I formatted 30 GB for XP Professional
when I loaded (ATA100 Drive). I am booting with a dual DVD/CD RW drive. I
also have Serial Raid ATA controller which I plan to install another hard
drive on.

Does it matter if I partition the remaining space on the 120 GB drive using
an Extended Partition and Logical Drives, or is it better to use Basic
Primary Partitions? It seems that I will be limited to 4 Partitions if I
use Primary? If I select Primary and divide into 4 partitions, will this
limit my ability to install other hard drives in this PC later--or can each
hard drive have 4 partitions? I understand only one can be active at a
time.

I want to install some of my programs on a separate drive and my data on
another--and keep one for storage--so 4 partitions would be enough. Would
it hurt anything to make 3 partitions and leave the rest unpartitioned until
I decide how many drives I want?

Also, I do not have a floppy drive installed yet. What is the best boot
order for my setup? Right now I have it set to CDROM Hard drive 0 and SCSI.
Will this cause a problem with the Serial ATA controller?

 

[Jerry]

Lori,

You can have only ONE primary partiton on a hard drive. Everything else is
an extended partiotn with logical drives.

I have a WD 120Gb drive with three 32Gb partitions and one 24. And I used
WD's data lifeguard program, on their web site, to set it up.

Only one partiton on any drive, usually the first primary on the first
drive, can be active. Even if you have 4 physical hard drives, divided into
four partitons each - only the first one, the boot one, is active.